Affecting People with Natural Language
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Aberdeen
Department Name: Computing Science
Abstract
Documents written in natural languages like English are increasingly being written by computers as well as people, and computer-written documents are used routinely in many specialised applications, such as weather forecasting.Unfortunately computer models of natural language generation have a relatively poor idea about how individual readers differ and which ways of saying things will be most appropriate for which readers. As a result, they are ill-suited to more challenging tasks, such as persuading a patient to give up smoking of using humour to change someone's beliefs about the significance of globall warming. These are tasks where the goal of the text is to affect the reader in a much deeper way than just to give them some important facts.The proposed research aims to improve NLG technology in terms both of sensitivity to the reader and also of the range of effects that can be achieved. For this, it is necessary for experts in the technology of NLG to learn from researchers in other fields, for instance psychology and user modelling, and for NLG researchers in turn to increase the robustness and generality of the technology to meet the new challenges.
Organisations
Publications
McKinlay A
(2010)
Design issues for socially intelligent user interfaces. A discourse analysis of a data-to-text system for summarizing clinical data.
in Methods of information in medicine
Mellish C
(2008)
Natural language directed inference from ontologies
in Artificial Intelligence
Paraboni I
(2007)
Generating Referring Expressions: Making Referents Easy to Identify
in Computational Linguistics
Piwek P
(2008)
Generating under Global Constraints: The Case of Scripted Dialogue
in Research on Language and Computation
Portet F
(2009)
Automatic generation of textual summaries from neonatal intensive care data
in Artificial Intelligence
Reiter E
(2007)
The Shrinking Horizons of Computational Linguistics
in Computational Linguistics
Reiter E
(2009)
An Investigation into the Validity of Some Metrics for Automatically Evaluating Natural Language Generation Systems
in Computational Linguistics
Thomas K
(2010)
Atlas.txt: exploring linguistic grounding techniques for communicating spatial information to blind users
in Universal Access in the Information Society
Tintarev N
(2012)
Evaluating the effectiveness of explanations for recommender systems Methodological issues and empirical studies on the impact of personalization
in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
Tintarev N
(2016)
Personal storytelling: Using Natural Language Generation for children with complex communication needs, in the wild
in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies